Friday Thing/k: The Bald & The Beautiful

Welcome to Friday Thing/k – a brand storytelling canvas where I’d like to share with you smart, creative, inspiring, engaging, cool, and innovative content marketing ideas that take my digital marketing breath away once a week.

The bald.

My native tongue is Hebrew.

In Hebrew, the act of “cutting hair” is the same word for “telling a story”.

And more often than not, hairdressers are actually their own kind of storytellers. I can vaguely remember though, as the last time I visited a hair salon was more than 15 years ago, which has nothing to do with me having very long hair or dreadlocks, I’m just bald.

That last time I went, I had the hairdresser shave my head (I used to go every 3 weeks). At the end of the shave, I asked him, “Is it true what they say? That if you shave your hair frequently, it will grow stronger?”

He looked at me in the mirror and said, “Mate, you’d better start working on your personality.” He opened my eyes and hasn’t seen me ever since.

So, for the last 15 years I’ve been shaving my head.

Over time, I’ve tried many different things until discovering Gillette’s How to Shave Your Head video, after which I perfected my technique. Part of a series of instructional shaving videos on YouTube that Gillette posted back in 2009, this cutting edge content marketing (at the time) or sharp content marketing, are just a few of the superlatives that come to the top of my shaved head when thinking of great content:

The beautiful.

According to recent data from OpenSlate, the top 100 beauty and style channels on the video platform pull in 582 million views each month.

The biggest draw?

How-to videos.

At Outbrain, we see tons of long-form tutorial videos Amplified from the likes of L’Oreal, Estee Lauder, Revlon and more.

Beauty retailer Sephora took it a step further and has been incorporating YouTube tutorials like the one below into their stores:

In its new San Francisco store which opened last November, Sephora designated stations called the “Beauty Workshop,” where customers can watch video tutorials, take a class with a Sephora team member, and share content online.

Known for being a frontrunner in digitizing the beauty retail space, their Innovation Lab is constantly trying to figure out what a beauty brand looks like in a world changed by technology. Basically, Sephora is “turning buzzing digital trends in the beauty world into moments that both enable education and drive conversion.”

Scavenger / hunt games are also a popular concept for campaigns, especially online.

One of my favorites campaigns of all times is MINI’s “Follow the White Rabbit” campaign by Profero.

Back in 2006, MINI took users on an adventure through unexpected content journeys across the web. Breaking the conventions of earlier days, the white interactive MINI did not take users to the MINI site, but instead, the banner ad brought them along different portholes — prehistoric for content discovery:

Happy Easter! See you next Friday.

As always, feedback is more than welcome, and needed so please leave comments below. Additionally, if you have anything/k in mind, I would love to discover it.

Just call me Joe.

Yoav Tourel

I joined Outbrain in 2012 as the Head of Account Strategy in Australia & New Zealand. Before that, I was born and bred as a media planner (it is still my passion!) and for more than 13 years I worked in advertising, media and research roles, mostly in the agency land. I now head the marketing effort in ANZ. I'm also a proud father of 3 girls (girls rock!), married to a vet (vets rock!). Oh, and some would say that I look like Andre Agassi and sounds like Borat. Anyway, just call me Joe (or Yoey).